Writer…Runner…Birder

Secrets

Just pulled Eudora Welty’s ONE WRITER’S BEGINNINGS from the shelf and opened the book to a page (p. 17) I’d marked when reading it several years ago. This was highlighted:

The future story writer in the child I was must have taken unconscious note and stored it away then: one secret is liable to be revealed in the place of another that is harder to tell, and the substitute secret when nakedly exposed is often the more appalling.

Eudora Welty wanted her mother to tell her where babies came from but the mother always spoke around the issue, never coming out with the facts. But one day Eudora happened upon a small white box that held two nickels, and she ran to her mother for permission to spend them. That was when Eudora learned a baby had been born before her, a brother who had died. “And these two nickels that I’d wanted to claim as my find were his. They had lain on his eyelids, for a purpose untold and unimaginable.”